Y Combinator’s year of changes continues: It has just announced another round of leadership appointments, including new partner Kat Manalac, and new part-time partners Yuri Sagalov, Patrick Collison, and Elizabeth Iorns, all of whom are Y Combinator alumni.

If you want to start a startup, there’s a school for that. It’s called Startup School, and it was created by YCombinator’s Paul Graham, who is now taking applications for attendees. The best part? It’s free.

Y Combinator just cut its startup class size down from 84 to a little fewer than 50 — nearly halving the amount of accepted startups, just like it recently halved the funding each company receives after graduating the program.

Email overload has become a hot topic lately. An average person now gets over 100 emails per day, and an average corporate employee over 200. Companies are looking for ways to replace email or just turn it off.

Paul Graham is the genius behind Y Combinator, one of the first startup incubators and the birthplace of immediately recognizable companies such as Reddit, Scribd, Disqus, Dropbox, Posterous, and many, many more. So if he gets worried, people listen.

The Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act may be on hiatus, but what’s really at stake are two equally critical values that don’t necessarily have to be in opposition of each other, Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski stated in a fireside chat at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich today.

Y Combinator’s Demo Days this year featured a crush of innovation and excitement. After 63 startups presented to a room full of reporters, VCs and other influencers, we were all exhausted — none more than the belles of this particular ball, the founders themselves.